On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 08:57:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I've debugged a lot of D code with no debugger at all (how else
could I port it to various platforms like Win64?).
I've actually not found debuggers to be of much use other than
telling me where the seg fault was and giving a stack trace.
I think the most valuable point Manu made is that there are
"excellent" and "good" programmers. The difference is not so much
in the actual skills, but in the willing to spend time on
programming.
"Excellent programmers" spend a great amount of time learning
things. It takes a huge part of their free time and it really
takes a lot of passion and diligence. But most of the
professional programmers are simply "good". They code at work and
that's it. They don't spend any time beyond that on programming
and, especially, learning new things.
If we're speaking about "excellent programmers" category, then
almost everything about D is already good enough for these
people. You can tell it by a number of truly fascinating D
projects.
And it looks like the guys who work on D are mostly "excellent
programmers", which speak pretty different language compared to
the "good programmers". Probably, this is the main cause of
misunderstanding.
In the "debugger" case, Manu's point is that it's unusable. And
Walter's implied point is "debuggers aren't that useful anyway,
so why it was a showstopper?".
My personal observation is that "excellent programmers" share the
Walter's point on debuggers - they practically don't use it. And
the uselessness is so obvious, that there's nothing even to talk
about. At the same time, "good programmers" use it extensively,
especially on Windows. It is so useful to them, that there's
nothing even to talk about!
So, Manu speaks from the "good programmer" position, and Walter
speaks from the "excellent programmer" position, implying "if
you'd become a better programmer, you wouldn't have no problems
using D".
This implication is mostly true. But it's orthogonal to Manu's
point - "good programmers" have troubles using D.
The probable solution to this is to attract some "good"
programmers to point out and work on the aforementioned issues -
site, documentation, tooling, etc. But I'm not sure it's possible
to do this for D with volunteer efforts.
